As a mega-fan of Dave Chappelle’s since college, his latest special was difficult to watch. I had held out hope (naively, it turns out) that he would use his Netflix farewell to make some sort of amends for using his vast platform at the regular expense of the LGBT community. What I saw instead was an all too familiar routine patterned after male celebrities unable to respond with maturity to valid criticism. For more than an hour, he doubled down on his past comments and waved his anti-trans flag around with more glee than ever, vanquishing any lingering doubts as to the status of his allyship. In truth, it felt less like a stand-up act than an hour-long apologia for his obsessive preoccupation with trans-antagonistic humor.

To say it fell totally flat is the most generous way of putting it, while ‘dreadfully predictable and cruel’ is more apt. Some might say he proved himself an accomplice to hate with his previous specials, but this one solidified it, with Chappelle even going so far as to close out his set by casually misgendering a dead trans woman — multiple times, just in case we chalked up the first one to a stray slip-up. This is no longer the Dave we grew to love with Killin’ Them Softly. His evolution from sharp social commentator to anti-PC curmudgeon has been terrible to witness in the way it’s always terrible when raw talent is wasted like this. As I say below, I will always believe in the possibility of redemption, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely after his latest salvo.

I’m reproducing here two more fleshed out reactions I shared on social media after watching Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix installment, The Closer.

(1) I’m curious how many others felt the same, but I just didn’t find it particularly funny? Even apart from the LGBT brickbats I’ll get into below. I laughed maybe twice during its 72-minute runtime. In terms of actual comedic content, it was overall pretty poor in both quality and quantity. And the few bits I did enjoy pale in comparison to most of his previous work. Which is to say, if you don’t consider a handful of laughs too much to ask for when watching a stand-up act, you might want to sit this one out. Those jonesing for some classic Dave are better off re-watching Killin’ Them Softly instead.

(2) Chappelle’s fixation with trans people, and trans women in particular, is genuinely a weird thing, notwithstanding the pain and damage his ignorance has inflicted on this community. He’s had this hang-up for virtually his whole career and I just don’t get how he’s made so little progress (if any). Much as he tries to conflate them throughout this special, his self-confessed transphobia and any perceived disparity in power between the movements for Black and LGBT justice are entirely separate issues. He needs to work on his transphobia, regardless of the latter. His “jealousy” of the brisk gains he sees in the LGBT domain doesn’t somehow negate his decadeslong history of transphobic commentary — not in the least. Nor is his ‘I had one trans friend who liked me’ in any way different from white people’s ‘I have a black friend’ defense. Same song, different verse. How could someone so seemingly intelligent commit this many unforced errors?

He was making these same jokes about AIDS and trans genitalia 16 years ago. They weren’t funny then and they still aren’t today. (At least in his early days, these amounted to side plots rather than the focal point.) The key difference now is that his targeted hate has wider reach and therefore hurts more people. And for the record, there is no conceivable universe in which threatening to kill a woman and throw them in the trunk of your car makes for a laughworthy bit in 2021 — unless, apparently, you’re comedy’s “G.O.A.T,” a title he claims for himself in this special.

“But it’s just jokes,” Chappelle stans retort, as if comedy is somehow immune to the same social pressures that guide behavior and conduct in every other societal domain. Except the way in which Chappelle speaks on these topics here is artless. In fact, much of his routine is neither comedic in tone nor laid out in the form of a traditional joke. “Gender is a fact,” he asserts, stone-faced, as if the case for this view makes itself. In case it isn’t obvious, that’s not a punch line, it’s straight hate speech — the kind that helps keep the lights on at NewsMax and Breitbart. If you’d take issue with a politician or talking head spouting this on Fox News, you should have a problem with Dave Chappelle doing the same in a Netflix special. And if you’d object to someone saying that being gay is a choice but not with Chappelle’s equally bigoted remarks that seek to erase any distinction between sex and gender, you might have a blind spot when it comes to trans people.

For his part, Chappelle seems positively mystified that the ubiquity of the internet could in turn mean more and stronger blowback from certain quarters, namely from LGBT activists and those whose generously salted wounds he insists on reopening. In what may have been the corniest joke of the night, Chappelle feebly attempts to shut down his most vocal critics dragging him online by declaring that “Twitter’s not a real place.” Only a deeply out of touch has-been could make a lousy one-liner like this while discounting the raw influence of the internet in today’s media landscape. As others have pointed out, Chappelle also completely contradicts himself later on when he suggests that it was Twitter attacks that led to his late friend, trans comedienne Daphne Dorman, to take her own life.

Honestly, what I saw last night was no different from the behavior we’ve observed from any number of other male figures who’ve come under fire for bigoted comments. It’s so boringly predictable — like a subroutine for contrarian celebrities. Whenever men of power are faced with backlash, they double down and, like a dog with a bone, refuse to let it go or thoughtfully reflect on the source of that backlash. Chappelle spent nearly the entire special on this singular topic, chasing his tail as he flitted from one ill-conceived argument to another, trying desperately to justify his bigotry and convince his detractors that he’s actually not the guy he continues to show us he is. What was painfully clear by the end is that he has no serious answer to the “punching down” critique that’s landed him in hot water over the years. If anything, his crude, relentless volley of lazy punchlines against the trans community here only served to validate his critics.

This is such a strange and sad saga because for whatever else you might say about Chappelle, he’s objectively a talented comic. Imagine getting twenty million dollars from Netflix to talk about anything in the world and you choose to do…this? Why? Does Dave have no other fun stories or insights from his globetrotting life? Any droll yet poignant commentary drawn from living through a pandemic? I’m certain he does. But instead he chose to dedicate the entirety of his Netflix finale to engaging in trans-exclusionary apologetics and bashing the easiest target since Donald Trump: “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” What a snooze. Not only is this unbefitting for a comic of his caliber, he’s far too smart to have misnavigated this debate in good faith, and without understanding the consequences. Dude knows full well what he’s doing and who he’s hurting, but when have powerful men ever let a little thing like that stand in the way of their ego?

As a friend cautioned on Facebook earlier this week, regardless of the position you take on the guy’s comedy, if you’re going to defend Chappelle, you HAVE to do it with scrutiny and attention to detail. You can’t do it blindly because it too easily invalidates the pain that he’s caused.

Given the new legacy Chappelle’s diligently created for himself and his unwillingness to make amends, this care should be top of mind wherever discussions of his work arise. I don’t much care whether he’s “canceled,” as I know that would never happen anyway. But any comic whose working definition of “edgy” is riffing on trans women and catering to anti-woke populism is as unimaginative as they are callous. While I remain firm in the belief that anyone is capable of redemption, Chappelle only makes the climb more treacherous each time he steps onto the stage. In the meantime, there are countless other stand-up acts perfectly capable of telling jokes without being an asshole.

P.S. Now is as good a time as any to donate to LGBT charities, like The Trevor Project and Human Dignity Trust.

Further reading:

• Response from Daphne Dorman’s roommate (mirrored here)
• Stevie Wonder Wasn’t the Weirdest Part
• Dave Chappelle’s Brittle Ego
• Dave Chappelle’s Betrayal
• Dave Chappelle’s ‘reckless’ #MeToo and trans jokes have real after-effects
• In Defense of Cancel Culture…and Dave Chappelle
• My Facebook post on Ricky Gervais dated May 25, 2022

 
 
Living in America, you encounter your fair share of bad faith argument. The internet is awash with bad actors who spend their time exploiting the anonymity afforded by social media and maliciously abusing the norms of civil discourse. In other words, trolls. With the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re seeing a variety of fallacious arguments reanimated by bad-faith agitators who pride themselves on lazily crafted objections that sound just compelling enough to the uninitiated or to those who already buy into the particular narrative they’re pressing.

So to start, I’ll share below a couple of pat responses to those objections that readers may find useful the next time you come up against similar talking points. The two I seem to come across most often are arguments from authority and argumentum ad populum (appeal to a majority). They’re deployed in some cases by right-wing partisans who feel the need to register token disagreement with anything they perceive as coming from “the left,” and in other cases by people who simply don’t like being contradicted or corrected after trying to pass off inaccurate information as fact.

This first example relates to those who attempt to dismiss your claims not by examining the claims themselves but by attacking the status of the person making them.
 

“But you’re not a scientist so why should we trust you?”

 
Response: You don’t have to trust me, but facts don’t suddenly cease to be facts when they’re conveyed by a non-scientist. If an astronomer says Mercury is the third planet from the sun, their having a PhD doesn’t make them right. And vice versa: If you say Mercury is the first planet from the sun, your not being an astronomer doesn’t make you wrong.

The second comes from people who attempt to parlay the groupthink quotient of their particular social bubble into validating their baseless assertions.
 

“But most people in this thread agree with me.”

 
Response: That doesn’t make you right, though. If you’re in a room with nothing but flat-earthers, espousing flat-earth views will earn you unanimous support. It doesn’t mean the earth is flat. Your belief can be shared by everyone with whom you regularly interact and still be contradicted by all observable data.

Both of the above arguments are red herrings as they fail to address the issue or question under debate. They’re meant to distract and derail rather than inform and clarify. It’s best to shut each down quickly before the discussion veers off course. Once focus shifts away from the evidence or claims presented, the troll has won. If you can beat them to the punch, you may have a chance at saving the thread from descending into a state that’s helpful to no one.

Radical Indifference

The above are archetypal bad faith comments, and in all honesty it may be best to block people who insist on engaging in this way. What I want to call attention to here is a different group of people who apparently mean well but who demonstrate a total lack of interest in what is true and factual. Not only do they not know ‘what the facts are’, they don’t care to find out. Worse still, there are in principle no wrong answers on their view — even when it comes to matters of scientific import. If an opinion seems to have been offered sincerely, it’s as valid as anyone else’s; both sides of an issue are equally trustworthy.

I’ve taken to labeling this phenomenon ‘radical indifference’, and I think in the long run it actually poses a greater danger than the obfuscationists who go out of their way to disrupt polite society and thwart substantive conversation. I encountered this mentality most recently as last week by way of a Facebook post from a friend I haven’t spoken to in years. Their post stressed that the decision over whether to get the Covid-19 vaccine is strictly a personal one and therefore worthy of respect on that basis. In my response, I chose not to address the merits of vaccination — both to the vaccinee and the people in their orbit — but rather the general theme of the post and its implications. Below is a screenshot of the post followed by the comment I left under it. I’ve blanked the name and picture as it was not Public.

 
I’d like to push back on some of the framing here a bit, if I could. I agree, at least in theory, that two people with the same information can reach different conclusions based on their personal values and goals. However, one of the big problems since this pandemic began (and with our national politics more generally, for that matter), is that people on opposing sides are often *not* working from the same information. At all, in fact. And to the extent that the information relevant to decisions such as whether to get vaccinated or whether to wear a mask is based on objectively gathered data, this opens up the possibility that one side is in fact ‘wrong’ — to the extent their conclusions are inconsistent with said data.

From personal experience in having conversations surrounding vaccines and masking, a lot of what passes for “medical freedom” and “personal choice” these days amounts to ignorance or preconceptions rooted in misinformation or partisan bias. These are phrases routinely used as cover for positions or decisions at stark odds with the underlying science/data. That is to say, the reasoning that often gets thrown out once you press someone on their decision to forego the vaccine or masks is largely fallacious and grounded in incorrect or inaccurate information. Not always, necessarily, but when it is, I don’t think we should give that person a pass by chalking it up to “personal choice” or pretending that their position is as valid as anyone else’s.

Because the truth is that not all perspectives/beliefs are equally valid, and I think we should be honest in admitting that. To take a rudimentary example, if someone says Mercury is the third planet from the sun, that person is wrong — objectively so. Likewise, if someone says the flu is more dangerous than Covid-19, or that the vaccines aren’t effective, or that HCQ is a cure for Covid-19, that person is plainly wrong from the perspective of all available evidence. Again, we’re not obligated to excuse them — even if they are our friends or family members — when the evidence is so clearly stacked against them.

Similarly, just because someone says they “researched” a particular issue does not automatically make their opinions valid. It’s not some miraculous word that makes a person worth listening to. It depends on whether that supposed research ever made contact with reliable and trustworthy sources and whether their resulting conclusions can actually be squared with the relevant scientific data. If someone tells you, for instance, that based on their research, Thomas Jefferson was actually the first POTUS and not the third, that doesn’t spontaneously invalidate all of the historical data we have to the contrary. It most likely means this person is mistaken or was led astray by misleading or otherwise inaccurate information.
 

 
Appeals to “balance,” “both sides,” “free speech,” “personal choice,” and the like are more often than not a calculated exercise in covering up inadequacy of evidence and the perceived right to muddy scientific debates with nonsense. If we truly believe that facts and evidence are important enough to guide our decisions as a society and as individuals (as opposed to fear, social pressure, and emotional reactivity as you rightly point out), then this should apply to our conversations about the pandemic as well. The notion that it’s all subjective and every opinion, no matter how intelligently arrived at, is equally valid and sound is, I would argue, the real “slippery slope” you should be worried about.

P.S. I want to emphasize that my comment should not be taken to mean that no sound reasons exist to refuse the vaccine or to decline to wear a mask. There are in fact medically legitimate reasons for why one might forego both, though these only apply to a small fraction of the human population. My comment should also not be interpreted as saying that anyone against vaccinating or masks is arguing in bad faith. Some of them are, while some are merely mistaken and misled. Hope that staves off any whataboutism that might follow.

 
 
I’m rather proud of this reply, though it stopped the thread cold. I don’t know if my words caused this person to rethink passing along what amounts to a remarkably casual disregard for truth, but either way, posts like this and the meaning behind them are deeply troubling to me. The attitude expressed here is almost anti-epistemological in the way it relativizes truth and evades the mere acknowledgment that there are right answers to be found. The notion that all research conducted on the internet rests on equal footing so long as one is “comfortable” with the decision they reach is similarly bonkers given how hazardous that task can be these days.

Similar sentiments scattered all across the internet — even on comment threads in the Times and the Post — are a tremendously dispiriting sign of decay. There’s such a widespread lack of interest or just lack of ability to actually read and consider what an article says, combined with a knee-jerk opinionism and leading with assertion over working through an argument. To say nothing of the defeatism and cynicism rampant among large swaths of our electorate. My hope is that this is all somewhat temporary, borne of the stress and anxiety that comes when a society’s guiding myths fall apart. My fear, though, is that with the ubiquity and unfettered environment of social media, we’ve lost our ability to think.

Worst case scenario is we’re effectively witnessing the endgame of authoritarian actors and other purveyors of disinformation. The denial of objective truth is an omen hastened along by antidemocratic forces whose goal is much more ambitious than merely reinforcing and popularizing anti-intellectual thought. It is to pull on the threads of democracy itself in an effort to bring down the whole ship. Putin and other autocratic leaders cut from similar cloth seek to disrupt through cyberwarfare the information-gathering process to such a degree that finding facts, and the sources capable of delivering them, seems a fool’s errand. When everyone is trapped in their own respective partisan bubbles, unable to critically think and parse evidence-based reality from abject nonsense, we as a society gradually lose the sense for what counts as reliable information in the first place, allowing fictions and delusions to flourish in its stead. We approach a point of no return where we no longer are guided by logic and reason and exude indifference toward the norms and institutions that keep democracy afloat.

As historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” I worry that we’re now seeing the fruits of chronic disinformation and misdirection close in around us. I worry that the strange power of propaganda has managed to seep into the minds of everyday people who would otherwise not so readily have abandoned fact-based living. I fret over the possibility that our trust in media and other civic institutions has so frayed that we’ve entered a world in which what one believes and what is true are invariably one and the same. I worry that the war over the “information sphere,” to use the terminology of our own intelligence agencies, has already been lost.

I don’t know where we go from here as a nation, or how to restrain our worst impulses that seem to be speeding us toward a dark and uncertain future, but I dearly hope we can find a way to break free before it’s too late.

Further reading:

• Russian Disinformation Targets Vaccines and the Biden Administration
• State Dept. Traces Russian Disinformation Links
• The Problem Isn’t Disinformation, It’s Dismediation
• Review: On Tyranny
• The American Abyss
• What Russia’s Meddling Can Tell Us About Their Motives and Our Indifference
• What is Disinformation?
• Dialogue is Hard. This Blueprint May Help.
• The Problem With Self-Imposed Echo Chambers
• I Debunked a Covid-19 Conspiracy Video

Feature image via Renew America Together

 
 
I think it’s important not to lose sight of what happened this past January. As time marches on, and the press moves on to the latest stories, I worry that many of us might misrecall the significance of that day, or forget about it altogether. Indeed, it’s quite easy to grow desensitized and reduce moments of import to a footnote of the Trump presidency after the daily affronts to our sense of decency that saturated our media diet the last four years. While those daily utterances of abject nonsense will surely fade from view, episodes like the border separations and the chaos that erupted in the halls of Congress six months ago should remain firmly rooted in living memory. I’ve saved the texts and emails my wife and I received from family and friends who reached out to check on us, as well as the various videos of those at the scene, because I believe that such things ought to be preserved.

I believe this not only because any act of domestic terrorism constitutes a bookmarkable chapter in our nation’s history, but because of the enduring relevance of what transpired. After all, the people responsible are still with us, and more importantly, so are the underlying motivations that saw hundreds of Americans storm the seat of U.S. democracy. Those motives don’t disappear the moment a new president is sworn in. The bulk of the rioters, almost exclusively white and male, acted in furtherance of a Lie premised ultimately, as we’ll see, on entrenched racism. Whether commitments to far-right conspiracies and causes will wane or accelerate in the years ahead, and how to combat them, are questions pertinent to social activists, our election security apparatus, and, perhaps especially, law enforcement and the U.S. military.
 

 
According to a recent study from the University of Chicago, and discussed at length above, the rioters were 93% white and 86% male. Hardly surprising, but then there’s this: the vast majority were middle-aged or older, gainfully employed, and married with kids (though for many of them that may have changed in the intervening months). This is inconsistent with what we have found when looking at the socioeconomic makeup of white nationalist and other far-right militia groups like Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and the Three Percenters, whose members tend to skew younger and match the jobless loner profile.

It’s important to note that although the study found extremist groups were in relatively short supply at the Capitol, it’s possible that the demonstrators who showed up shared an overlapping ideology with these factions despite no formal affiliation. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2020 Year in Hate and Extremism report found that many extremists are not formal members of any organization. They are usually radicalized via online platforms and in the process may interact with organized antigovernment groups without joining them. Consequently, we need to look beyond connections to leading extremist organizations in discerning ideologues capable of engaging in hate violence.

Another interesting finding is that more than half of the rioters hailed not from deep-red counties and districts, as we might expect, but from counties that Biden won in 2020. A lot of them in fact were Trump supporters who traveled from the bluest parts of America to participate in the riot. One final takeaway from the study was that these largely white men were more likely to call home places where the white population had experienced marked declines compared to the Hispanic and Black populations, which naturally includes those blue-heavy urban locales Biden shored up.

The director of the project, Richard Pape, traces the driving ideology of those present at the riot to the “Great Replacement” theory, the notion that the rights of white people are being superseded by the rights of minority groups as the latter’s numbers eclipse the former’s in Western democracies. It’s a theory that picked up steam initially in Europe, and was adopted shortly thereafter by neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups in the United States. The insurrectionists were also united in their belief the election was stolen, of course, but according to Pape and his colleagues, it was profound concerns over racial replacement that made the difference between the violent demonstrators who arrived in Washington and the passive observers who remained at home.

One plausible explanation for the participants’ counties of origin might be that in places where far-right voters are grossly outnumbered by their blue-leaning counterparts, the feeling of being hemmed in by the prevailing ideology better animates one to express their political frustrations in more raucous, even violent ways relative to their co-thinkers in deep-red localities. Thus while sympathy toward GR ideas exists in both red and blue enclaves, it’s the predominantly blue areas where the pro-Trump contingent is more likely to act on their core beliefs because the politics they so despise — and the minorities they resent — are more ubiquitous and harder to avoid. It was the sense of futility bred from the absence of solidarity in offline spaces, combined with the misinfo circulating in online spaces, that spurred them to action.

In order to assess the risk of further seditious efforts by the far-right that could materialize in ways both big and small, Dr. Pape shares a rather troubling poll his group conducted in tandem with the National Opinion Research Council. They asked 1,000 American adults whether they still believe the election was stolen and, additionally, whether they would be willing to personally participate in a violent protest. The results indicate that 4% of American adults, or 10 million people, respond ‘yes’ to both questions, with the strongest predictor being belief in the GR. Worse, we know that active or retired military, law enforcement, and government personnel make up a significant chunk of this figure, as more than 1 in 10 charged in the riot check at least one of those boxes.

In hindsight, the dramatic conflagration witnessed on January 6th of this year was possibly the only way for the Trump era to end: with deluded bands of costumed, antidemocratic, white nationalist radicals armed with bats and chemical spray laying waste to America’s foundational institutions, egged on by their beloved truth-trasher and Deluder-in-Chief. But there is a danger in dismissing what happened as just another disgraceful, mock-worthy day in an era chock full of them. Nothing about the last six months has abated interest in the conspiracist ideas that culminated in the antics back in January. The extremism harbored in the hearts and minds of everyday Americans will be with us for a long time to come, waiting for the right opportunity to strike out against the targets of that hatred.

And while it’s far from clear how best to deprogram those enamored with tenets of extremism, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the central role those beliefs played in the insurrection, and why they continue to pose a material threat to the preservation and strengthening of our democracy. If we focus only on the proximate convictions surrounding the 2020 election as opposed to the guiding force of racial resentment rampant in white society, we run the risk of thinking that the energy of far-right movements will dissipate as the events of January 6th recede further into the past. The election may be over, but the anarchy at the Capitol was always about much more than the fraudulent counting of ballots. It was fueled by an insidious strand of racial paranoia that’s festered among right-wing groups for decades. Those who would brush off the events of that day as mere ‘politics as usual’ underestimate both the scale of the threat before us and the degree to which nutty ideas can inspire mass violence.
 

Further reading:

• The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists
• These Are the Rioters Who Stormed the Nation’s Capitol
• Ronan Farrow: Who Were the Rioters on Jan. 6th?
• Off-Duty Police Officers Investigated, Charged With Participating In Capitol Riot
• Here Are The Police Officers And Other Public Employees Arrested In Connection To Capitol Riot
• Police Forces Dealing With Officers Involved in Capitol Riots
• ‘A nightmare scenario’: Extremists in police ranks spark growing concern after Capitol riot
• The warning signs before the Capitol riot
• FBI: U.S. Capitol Violence
• ‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: The inside story of Trump’s defiance and inaction on Jan. 6

Image credits: Vox (feature); Jon Cherry/Getty Images

 
 
In a post commemorating the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death, Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, affirms some of the unsung heroes that played pivotal roles in securing justice for Floyd and his family over the past year. There’s 17 year-old Darnella Frazier, whose righteous indignation in choosing to record rather than walk past allowed the world to bear witness to an evil that may otherwise have gone unnoticed and unpunished. And there’s Christopher Martin, the 18 year-old cashier who took Floyd’s $20 bill on that fateful day, whose recent interviews painfully demonstrate the long arc of our extraordinarily broken justice system. We may never know or understand the full toll this atrocity has taken on the people close to it, but we can seek to honor the remarkable courage of those who showed up when it mattered most.

Upon reflecting on the statistics Huang presents on police accountability, it seems clear that the outcome of Derek Chauvin’s trial was far from certain, and if anything represents an extreme outlier in the history of such cases. Indeed, were it not for two key elements — his fellow officers coming forward and testifying against him, and a more diverse jury — Chauvin would likely have joined the 99% who walked free following similar episodes of police brutality.

When police kill a civilian, a series of obstacles stand in the way of achieving justice for the victim, from the messy procedural nightmare that is police investigating themselves to the laws in place that grant considerable discretion to on-duty officers in the use of force. Accountability in modern policing is a fleeting and scarcely observed phenomenon precisely because the system is inherently designed to give special protections to law enforcement (see the doctrine of Qualified Immunity for more on this). Even with footage uploaded to YouTube, replete with matching autopsy evidence, holding police officers legally liable for their misconduct is nearly impossible in most cases.

The people of Minnesota know this all too well. Four years before Floyd’s death, an officer from a different police department in Minneapolis was charged in the shooting of Philando Castile. Same city, different ending. Castile, a 32 year-old Black man, was shot at point-blank range five times in his car during a routine traffic stop. Video of the encounter taken by Castile’s girlfriend, who was also in the car, later showed that Castile actually had the wherewithal to inform the officer he had a gun in the car before reaching for his license and registration — a decision that in hindsight proved to be fatal.

That officer, Jeronimo Yanez, walked after his trial in 2017. Unlike Chavin’s trial, the officers in Yanez’s department, including the police chief, all testified on his behalf. And the resulting verdict was decided by eight jurors, just two of whom were Black, compared to the twelve jurors, four of whom were Black and two of whom identified as multiracial, in Chauvin’s trial.

That the Chauvin verdict came as such a surprise despite the many courageous young women and men who captured the carnage on video and shared their stories both in and out of court is a testament to the massive reforms needed to hold those within the orbit of law enforcement more consistently accountable. We shouldn’t have to count on officers breaking ranks or judges to press for diverse juries, when history shows us this almost never happens. To turn the Chauvin outcome from a vanishingly rare exception to the rule requires a top-down rethink of not just policing but our entire justice system. Ultimately we must remove the discrepant veil of protection around those serving in a public capacity and make it more difficult for law enforcement and other state officials to escape legal consequences for clear, egregious abuses of power.

Instead of teaching generations of young Black men how to navigate a society that doesn’t respect Black life and a policing culture that seems hell-bent on killing them year in and year out, we should be addressing the systemic factors that feed the cycle of racial injustice in America.

Excerpts:
 

“The events of that day and the rise of Black Lives Matter protests across the globe have been seared into our minds and the history books for decades to come – and that’s because of the remarkable courage of many people and the conviction of one.

The courage was demonstrated by Darnella and other witnesses who stepped forward to counter the excuses of the legal defense team. In addition to Darnella, who testified in the trial of the killer, others who showed great courage were Jena Scurry, a 911 dispatcher who reported her concerns about the treatment of Floyd; Alisha Oyler, who was working nearby and took video recordings; Donald Williams II, a mixed martial arts fighter who warned the police that they were killing Floyd; Judeah Reynolds, Darnella’s 9-year-old cousin who also witnessed the murder; Alyssa Funari, another 17-year-old girl who recorded the killing; Kaylynn Gilbert, also 17, who witnessed the murder; Genevieve Hansen, a firefighter who offered to render aid to Floyd and was rebuffed by the police officers; Christopher Belfrey, who videotaped the murder; and Christopher Martin, a 19-year-old store clerk who had reported Floyd’s use of a counterfeit bill and later observed the murder.

It’s especially notable that so many of the witnesses who came forward were young people, people who had reason to fear the consequences of their bravery. Many of these young women and men were Black – and all were familiar with the frequent stories of police harassment and violence against their community. These witnesses took the stand seeking justice for Floyd, regretting their inability to stop the murder and anxiously calling for accountability. Their courage should serve as an inspiration to all of us. What if each of us were given the chance to stand up to police brutality? Would we be as brave? As Dr. Martin Luther King noted, “we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Our country was well-served by these brave young people who spoke out to demand justice.”

[…]

“This story is also unusual because it resulted in a conviction. According to Mapping Police Violence, 7,666 police officers killed someone in the U.S. between 2013 and 2019. Mapping Police Violence defines a police killing as “a case where a person dies as a result of being shot, beaten, restrained, intentionally hit by a police vehicle, pepper sprayed, tasered, or otherwise harmed by police officers, whether on-duty or off-duty.” Of the 7,666 cases, only 25 officers were convicted of a crime. In another 74 cases, the officers were charged with a crime but not convicted. In 99% of the cases, officers were not charged with any crime whatsoever.”

Further reading:

• One year after George Floyd’s death: Courage and conviction drive movement
• ‘I allowed myself to feel guilty for a very long time’: the teenage cashier who took George Floyd’s $20 bill
• Derek Chauvin Verdict Brings a Rare Rebuke of Police Misconduct
• Derek Chauvin’s trial shows cracks in blue wall of silence
• Derek Chauvin trial testimony by police brass is unprecedented
• Police shootings: Trials, convictions are rare for officers
• From Berlin to Syria, street artists are honouring George Floyd
• In Germany, George Floyd’s Death Sparks Protests — And Artwork That Honors His Life
• ‘My emotions were so raw’: The people creating art to remember George Floyd

Feature image credit: Flickr / Lorrie Shaull

 
 
As an ex-vangelical myself, I always feel the need to comment on these sorts of things. I chalk it up to a mix of residual guilt on the one hand and a felt obligation to speak out on the other, each stemming from the fact I once counted myself among the rank and file of this deeply misguided demographic. More than that, I was an active participant on the wrong side of the culture war for several years before I decided to put my nose in a book not called the bible and lend an ear to those outside of my highly circumscribed bubble.

On the plus side, spending those first two decades of my life enmeshed in a retrogressive culture imparted an insider’s perspective that, combined with my post-Christian experience, can serve as a prism through which others may better understand the evangelical mindset. One development people have trouble wrapping their heads around is white evangelicalism’s close ties to anti-mask and other Covid-centric denialism, as covered in the The New York Times story linked above.

With more than a third of the country identifying as “born-again” or evangelical, and nearly half of white evangelicals saying they would decline vaccination, it’s looking more and more like a real possibility that this group could prevent us from reaching herd immunity and returning to some semblance of normal life. We need to talk about it.

It’s not that there’s some innately Christian reason for evincing skepticism about vaccines (or indeed about science), or a longrunning textual tradition that grounds conspiracist ideas about the pandemic. There is, to be sure, an emphasis in evangelicalism on faith healing and divine cures, and indeed some evangelicals may cite such convictions in defense of their contrarianism. There’s also the mark of the beast story from Revelation that some Christian and other groups have worked into their batshit theories about Covid vaccines being vehicles for implanting microchips in everyone (courtesy of Bill Gates of course). But these are not primarily what’s driving resistance within this group.

It’s less about religion than about politics. Evangelicalism is best understood as a political movement at this point in our nation’s history. Over the last four decades and change — ever since the Moral Majority movement in the Reagan years spearheaded by the late Jerry Falwell — especially white evangelicalism has more or less merged with the Republican Party in the US to the extent the two may as well be synonymous. It’s where the term “Christian right” found its origin. The two factions are so closely aligned that they serve as reciprocal echo chambers, each taking cues from the other in a concerted effort to crush liberal progressivism.

Throughout the past year, evangelicals’ preferred partisan authorities (i.e., conservative politicians and pundits) have parroted skeptical noises about masks and vaccines, and they’ve adopted these ideas in turn. Anthony Fauci’s scientific credentials are utterly irrelevant, associated as he is with Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia in their eyes. Even pastors and church leaders have been supplanted by Fox News and radio personalities. Time formerly spent in prayer and religious instruction is now devoted to consuming conservative media in its sundry forms. In short, their religious identity has become subservient to their political identity.

And it’s been this way in evangelical circles for quite some time now. When Trump arrived on the scene, most white evangelicals handed him their endorsement without a second thought: he was merely the next conduit for achieving their political goals and aspirations. That he despised the left as much as they do and rehashed the same familiar rhetoric they imbibe on a daily basis were the only ‘qualifications’ he needed. His religious cred was a factor as immaterial as Dr. Fauci’s scientific expertise. His white identity politics, meanwhile, only seemed to further endear him to this community. Unholy though it may be, the alliance between white evangelicalism and Trumpism was eminently predictable for anyone with insight into the Christian right. Not winning them over would have been the only real surprise, considering how far in advance this particular stage had been set for Trump’s brand of politics, and thus we cannot give him credit even for this.

This all begins to make more sense once you recognize that modern evangelicalism is only thinly related to the forms of Christianity that developed in the centuries since Jesus’ death. It has almost nothing in common, for example, with the more thoughtful piety of Augustine or Origen or Aquinas or Warfield, or even C.S. Lewis, each of whom held views that don’t line up with fundamentalist takes on scripture, salvation, or science. The evangelicalism so prevalent in American society today is more of a social pathology that expresses itself as religion. When you hear from Christians who articulate viewpoints at odds with mainstream science, the focus isn’t so much on religious premises as political ones; their worldview is grounded in a contrarian, anti-liberal, anti-D/democratic ethos that prides itself on anti-intellectualism and culture-war antagonism. The average white evangelical finds his or her central source of energy in political talking points, not religious convictions or creeds, and vaccine resistance is but the latest manifestation of this phenomenon.

Excerpts:

“The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.

The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.”

[…]

“White pastors have largely remained quiet. That’s in part because the wariness among white conservative Christians is not just medical, but also political. If white pastors encourage vaccination directly, said Dr. Aten, “there are people in the pews where you’ve just attacked their political party, and maybe their whole worldview.”

[…]

“At this critical moment, even pastors struggle to know how to reach their flocks. Joel Rainey, who leads Covenant Church in Shepherdstown, W.Va., said several colleagues were forced out of their churches after promoting health and vaccination guidelines.

Politics has increasingly been shaping faith among white evangelicals, rather than the other way around, he said. Pastors’ influence on their churches is decreasing. “They get their people for one hour, and Sean Hannity gets them for the next 20,” he said.”

Further reading and resources:

• White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort
• The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind
• America may be close to hitting a vaccine wall
• The Right’s Fight to Make America a Christian Nation
• After Trump and Moore, some evangelicals are finding their own label too toxic to use
• ‘American Heretics’ Film Offers a Hopeful Vision for Religion’s Future

Image credit: AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File

 
 
One of the best aspects of studying history is being able to channel its power to crush myths and received wisdom alike. Among the many sobering revelations in recent years for me has been the absurd dysmorphia that exists between America’s self-styled status as an immigrant-friendly nation — a safe haven for the downtrodden for which the Statue of Liberty stands as an enduring symbol — and what our history, and indeed our present, actually shows. I’ve come to accept that, as a nation, we simply don’t embody the values so poignantly captured by Emma Lazarus. What I didn’t fully realize is the degree to which we never have, and how in fact we actively worked against them in favor of policies coded along racial lines. If her immortalized words represent something akin to a national credo, as generations of Americans have assumed, how come we never acted the part?

Caitlin Dickerson’s first story for The Atlantic looks at the history of immigration in the US. In speaking with dozens of scholars on the subject, she finds that our internal strife over whether to let in foreigners has existed from the country’s inception. As Caitlin demonstrates, and as our history relates with startling clarity, we’ve never been a nation that welcomed immigrants — excepting those of Northern and Western European descent. Our legacy is one in which immigrants of color were routinely and systematically deprioritized in terms of eligibility, and explicitly targeted for deportation and border enforcement.

A key point Caitlin makes is that our “nation of immigrants” tagline is only true in the most literal and superficial sense. What’s often left out of the narrative is how racialized our policy toward immigrants has always been. Examples abound of limiting immigration in a naked attempt to preserve America’s ‘whiteness’. From the 19th century onward, our government’s leaders pursued this immigration agenda with alacrity and made no attempt to conceal its singular purpose. Our history on immigration policy can thus be more accurately thought of as a history of racial exclusion, wherein only predefined ethnic groups were permitted access to the American dream.

I didn’t learn basically any of what’s covered in this article in grade school. And in talking with teacher friends of mine, that’s because it’s generally not covered in public school curricula, at least not in detailed fashion. I suspect it’s one reason why many of America’s founding myths are so pervasive: we haven’t allowed our history to speak for itself and properly debunk them. Even Trump’s maximally inhumane immigration policies were held up by opposing factions as a reason to return to a bygone era more in tune with the ideals and principles on which the country was supposedly founded. What Caitlin argues, rather, is that if we are to forge a better path for the future, we shouldn’t be looking to our own past for guidance, but should instead be using that history to improve upon the ideals we never bothered living up to in the first place.

Excerpts from America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses (emphasis mine):
 

“This forgetting has allowed the racism woven into America’s immigration policies to stay submerged beneath the more idealistic vision of the country as “a nation of immigrants.” That vision has a basis in truth: We are a multiethnic, multiracial nation where millions of people have found safety, economic opportunity, and freedoms they may not have otherwise had. Yet racial stereotypes, rooted in eugenics, that portray people with dark skin and foreign passports as being inclined toward crime, poverty, and disease have been part of our immigration policies for so long that we mostly fail to see them. “It’s in our DNA,” Romo says. “It’s ingrained in the culture and in the laws that are produced by that culture.”

[…]

“President Joe Biden’s immigration plan would make citizenship available to millions of unauthorized immigrants. Democratic members of Congress rallying behind it have said it would establish a more inherently American system, arguing implicitly that the Trump administration’s often overtly stated preference for white immigrants, or no immigrants at all, was an aberration from the past. “To fix our broken immigration system, we must pass reforms that reflect America’s values,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a co-sponsor of the proposed legislation, said in a statement introducing the bill. “For too long, our immigration system has failed to live up to the ideals and principles our nation was founded on,” said Senator Alex Padilla of California, another co-sponsor. But Donald Trump’s immigration agenda was executed without a single change to laws already passed by Congress, and his rhetoric and policies were consistent with most of American history. “The Trump era magnified the problem, but the template was there,” Rose Cuison-Villazor, a scholar of immigration law at Rutgers University, told me.”

[…]

“As the country moves forward from the past four years of harsh immigration policies, it must reckon with a history that stretches back much further, and that conflicts with one of the most frequently repeated American myths. “This idea that somehow immigration was based on the principles stated on the Statue of Liberty? That never happened,” Romo said. “There has never been a color-blind immigration system. It’s always been about exclusion.”

[…]

“When the Pilgrims crossed the ocean to settle in the New World, they brought with them ideas that would evolve into “manifest destiny,” which held that the United States was a land that had been bestowed by God on Anglo-Saxon white people. In 1790, the first American Congress made citizenship available only to any “free white person” who had been in the country for at least two years. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act blocked Chinese immigrants—and in 1917, it was expanded to block most Asians living between Afghanistan and the Pacific. These laws were upheld numerous times by federal courts, including in a seminal Supreme Court case from 1922, in which the government prevailed by arguing that citizenship should be granted as the Founders intended: “only to those whom they knew and regarded as worthy to share it with them, men of their own type, white men.”

[…]

“To call America a nation of immigrants is not wrong, either as a factual statement or an evocation of American myth. But that fact coexists with this one: Over the past century, the United States has deported more immigrants than it has allowed in. Since 1882, it has deported more than 57 million people, most of them Latino, according to Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. No other country has carried out this many deportations. This “challenges that simplistic notion of a long tradition where the United States has welcomed immigrants,” Goodman told me.”

[…]

“There are legitimate debates to be had about how to balance economic, geopolitical, and humanitarian concerns in formulating immigration policy. But too often, such concerns have been invoked as euphemisms to disguise arguments that are really about race.”

[…]

“In moving toward the more inclusive system that some elected officials now say they want, the country would be not returning to traditional American values, but establishing new ones.”

 
 
A story out of Evanston, Illinois has garnered national attention. The city has voted to pay a sum of $400,000 to qualifying Black residents. Naturally, this has set off a firestorm of controversy within the local community and across the country. I fully expect to see a slack-jawed Tucker Carlson segment in the coming days. Reparations as an idea has never been popular among Americans, on either side of the political aisle. But advocates hope that the Chicago suburb’s pioneering efforts will help the concept pick up political currency and serve as a blueprint for other cities and states across the US.

For those who may not be familiar with the conversation on reparations, there’s no better place to start than with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay, The Case for Reparations. He begins with the premise that racist policies of the past created a race-based wealth disparity that compounded with each new generation. A key point he makes in the piece is that even if we could somehow make all current policies and culture race-neutral, the effects of the past would still leave us with the problem of racial inequality. Thus changing current policy without addressing past inequities is inadequate. One way to do this is to pay reparations to the inheritors of historical injustice.

A lot of the anti-reparations rhetoric that gets passed around today is grounded in incredulity (and latent or undisguised racism of course, but we’ll ignore that more obvious motivator for now). ‘How would something like this even work?’ ‘Who would qualify’? ‘When would it end’? In fact, this is not the Rubik’s cube type of dilemma many make it out to be. Smart people have been working on this issue for years and have drafted a number of formal proposals at the state and local levels. It also wouldn’t be the first time the US government paid out reparations to its citizens.

Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln signed into law an act that ended slavery in the District of Columbia and promised federal compensation to slaveowners, who weren’t so much asking skeptical questions as making strong demands for their change in fortune. With the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, the government paid former slaveholders up to $300 (equivalent to $8,000 in 2019) for each slave released to compensate them for their “lost property.” Southern slaveowners at the time ridiculed the impracticality of such a plan, but in the end virtually all of the appropriated funding in the act was paid out. Similar legislation was defeated in Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri in the years leading up to 1865.

Later, during Reconstruction, the government promised 40 acres and a mule to all freed Black men. Unlike the straight cash payments provided to white slaveowners, this one never came to pass. The policy was reversed by Andrew Johnson, with the promise made to the freed Blacks of the South never fulfilled. (Who else never learned about this in grade school?) Thus when the question at issue was the protection of slaveowners’ ‘property’ rights, legislators saw fit to provide restitution. But when the recipients of the compensation turned to freed Blacks — the victims of an immoral institution — the government reneged on its promise. The US government has always deemed people of color unworthy of participating in the American dream or sharing in its vast wealth.

This may seem like ancient history but this had long-term effects on the Black population, as property ownership was one of the key factors in the white population becoming relatively well off and without said land generations of Black people lived in poverty working for white farmers. The USDA concluded in a 1997 study that the reversal of this policy led to steep declines in Black agriculture. These effects only compounded with redlining, a set of discriminatory lending policies that sprang from FDR’s New Deal.

Redlining was initially used by Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (a corporation founded and sponsored by the government as part of the New Deal) to determine which American neighborhoods were eligible or “suitable” for a loan. They mapped neighborhoods according to a color rating system, ranging from GREEN for the best rating to RED for the worst rating (i.e., no lending). Neighborhoods where *any Black people* — even just ONE Black person or family — lived often were marked in red, given the lowest rating, and thereby ruled ineligible for home or business loans. As Coates writes:

“Neither the percentage of Black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”

Over the next few decades, this practice not only systematically starved Black communities of economic resources — commonly referred to as the forced “ghettoization” of Black neighborhoods — it also created a strong financial incentive for white homogeneity that stretched across American suburbia. By artificially raising the value of white neighborhoods and white-owned property, it reinforced associations of blackness with poverty, which in turn fueled educational inequality, perpetuated de facto segregation through white self-segregation and “white flight,” drove up intergenerational wealth for whites, and stigmatized diverse neighborhoods, no matter how safe, friendly, or stable.

While redlining officially ended in 1977, its effects continue to be felt to this day. A 2018 report found that 74% of neighborhoods HOLC graded as high-risk or “hazardous” are low-to-moderate income neighborhoods today, while 64% of the neighborhoods graded “hazardous” are minority neighborhoods today. “It’s as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty,” said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC. An earlier study from 2017 found that areas deemed high-risk by HOLC’s maps saw an increase in racial segregation over the next 30–35 years, as well as a long-run decline in home ownership, house values, and credit scores. Finally, a 2020 study in American Sociological Review found that HOLC practices led to substantial and persistent increases in racial residential segregation.

Several states and localities, including California, Amherst, Massachusetts, Asheville, North Carolina, Iowa City, Iowa, and Providence, Rhode Island, have considered reparations measures in recent years to right these historical wrongs. Evanston, Illinois looks like it will be the first to actually follow through with it. That a Chicago suburb would be the pilot city for a program like this is especially fitting given that Chicago suffered some of the harshest effects of redlining policies throughout the previous century.

Evanston’s implementation, however, comes with some pretty large asterisks attached. First, it’s not direct cash payments that Black residents, which make up 16% of Evanston’s population, will receive. Instead the funds are to be used specifically for mortgage-related payments, including down payments, or home repairs and improvements. Second, due to the plan’s stringent requirements, only about 20 people in the town are even eligible to receive the payments, which amount to $25,000 per resident.

Given these limitations, some critics on the left argue we shouldn’t consider these reparations at all but as more of a low-key Section 8 housing program that fewer than two dozen people will benefit from. It’s a fair point, though it’s important to keep in mind that this initial $400,000 tranche is part of the city’s pledge to spend a total of $10 million in reparations over the next decade. We don’t yet know what form later compensation efforts will take, and at any rate, it makes sense to focus on housing out of the gate due to the structural injuries suffered by the surrounding community over many decades.

While hardly an ideal version of what many activists championing reparations have in mind, this is clearly a first stab at something that was always going to be met with widespread cultural hostility. Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that a proposal with broader and less conditioned forms of compensation more in line with mainstream progressive advocacy would have been dead on arrival. The city council passed the measure with an 8-1 vote, but you can already see the rancorous pushback up and down the political spectrum. Black reparations ideas are hugely unpopular in the US: a Reuters poll last year found that only 20% of Americans support using “taxpayer money to pay damages to descendants of enslaved people in the United States,” including only a third of Democrats. And this was one month after the murder of George Floyd.

I personally view reparations for Black and indigenous communities as a necessary but not sufficient means of addressing the underlying systemic issues baked into the American social fabric. It’s less about addressing racism itself than elevating Black people in our nation to a more fair place. The remnants of slavery, Reconstruction era policy, and redlining still impact these communities and leave individuals more vulnerable as a result. Direct compensation, while a form of remedial justice, doesn’t strike at the root problems that vein through the institutions of American life.

We might draw an analogy here to the climate crisis. While scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide might help offset some of the planet-warming emissions for which we are responsible, it does nothing to blunt the emissions themselves. At the same time, when the damage is all around us, anything we can do to remedy present and future suffering should be on the table.

Although it’s obvious that we need to go beyond simply giving structurally disadvantaged groups money to deal with racism, I view Evanston’s initiative as a step in the right direction. We have to start somewhere, and in the US even the first step can prove an insurmountable challenge (see the tumultuous history of the single-payer healthcare debate for reference). Those who instinctively shoot down reparations as a concept must ask themselves what, specifically, they propose we do to remedy the race-based disparities evident in society today. After all, structural racism won’t be fixed overnight, and continuing to hold out for sweeping change overlooks the easier-to-implement policies that can be accomplished now. Waiting around for Congressional or other top-down measures, meanwhile, only perpetuates the standing inequities indefinitely, not unlike how delaying proximate or near-term actions on climate change snowballs the impacts to be felt down the road.

Truly upsetting the racial balance of power and prosperity in America will require broader and more radical reforms than can be found in this proposal. But to expect those reforms to come in the opening act is to place an undue burden on a small city like Evanston. That organizers and activists around the state managed to achieve this important milestone is noteworthy in itself. To be sure, we’ll need deeper economic development and autonomy for affected communities to help correct for centuries of past injustice, but housing assistance paid directly to Black residents is no small start.

Further reading and resources:

• As Evanston, Illinois approves reparations for Black residents, will the country follow?
• The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• What is Owed by Nikole Hannah-Jones
• The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations by HBS Professor Mihir Desai
• Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It’s still hurting minorities today.
• We Built This: Consequences of New Deal Era Intervention in America’s Racial Geography
• How Structural Racism Works
• US black-white inequality in 6 stark charts
• The Racial Wealth Gap in America
• Examining the Black-white wealth gap
• The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950

 
 
Rush Limbaugh has officially been canceled. Not “canceled,” mind you, like the Bill Burrs and Joe Rogans who take routine jabs at women and trans people and yet still manage to inundate your Netflix feed each and every time you log on. No, this time it’s permanent, more or less (less if Rush’s mini-me, Alex Jones, has something to say about it, though his future prospects are dubious at best these days).

Truth be told, Rush’s death hits closer to home than usual for me. People I was once very close with fell prey to his frenzied rhetoric over the years, and they’ve never been the same since. People who became so earnest in their hostility to outside ideas that they were no longer capable of rational dialogue. People who, whatever their strengths on an interpersonal level, became dialectically unreachable after years of siloing themselves in reactionary echo chambers. Before long, I began to identify which of those folks in my life truly were a lost cause — unworthy of my time, consideration, and mental energy going forward. I responded accordingly by removing them from my personal spaces, thereby relieving myself of the cognitive burden associated with interacting with them.

Many of those people were fans of Rush Limbaugh. If you’ve ever confronted a baby boomer for saying something absurdly obtuse or inaccurate, there’s an outsize chance it can be traced back to Limbaugh’s radio show. For decades, he filled the airwaves with aggressive bigotry and zany conspiracy theories, transforming everyday men and women (mostly men) into zealots for a thoughtless and particularly antisocial brand of right-wing politics. He provided a permanent platform for climate denial, allowing fallacies and misconceptions to spread further than ever before. His success, virtually unmatched by competitors on either side of the aisle, set the stage for Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Mike Cernovich, and other rabid tagalongs to pick up the torch.

Even as death’s door approached, Rush spent his final months on this earth peddling pandemic falsehoods and stanning for Trumpism. He told his impressionable audience on several occasions that the coronavirus is no more serious than the common cold and denounced lockdowns as a form of leftist overreach. Along with the virus, he helped spread the impeached president’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. In doing so, he stoked latent unrest among the more extremist elements in our society and then downplayed the violence at the Capitol that ensued. The demagogic grifter, who once gleefully spelled out the “formula” for manipulating his listeners, profited off an ecosystem of lies and toxicity to the very end.

In a sentence, Rush Limbaugh was an utter abomination to the human race who sowed division and intolerance on a scale only a rarefied few throughout history have matched. He was a lifelong misogynist, a vile and disgusting racist, and a constant source of hatred toward gay and trans persons. His stigmatization of the LGBT community, especially, was ritualistic in nature and bordered on extravagance. During the height of the AIDS epidemic he aired a segment titled “AIDS Update” in which he read off names of gay men who had died from HIV while party horns and bells rang out in the background, with the lead-in music set to “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” by Dionne Warwick. There was a dark malevolence to his rhetoric that signaled a deeper moral rot, and I like to think that this, in addition to the lung cancer, played some role in his early demise.

Many op-eds will be published this week examining this man’s contemptible legacy, but the truth is that no one could ever hope to capture the plenitude of his wretchedness. This was a man who dedicated his life’s work to fanning the flames of acrimony in U.S. politics and seemed to take sincere pride in doing so. In fact, there may be no single person more responsible for the decay of political discourse in this country. He radicalized members of my own family and I won’t soon forget it. The broken, mean-spirited, empathetically challenged soul whose media empire ran on equal parts hurt and hate, should now be left in ignominy where he belongs, a stinging blight on American culture writ large.

Let it never be forgotten that the latter decades of Rush’s life were spent magnifying anti-intellectualism, normalizing hate, and creating discord in a nation that rewarded his efforts with obscene amounts of wealth and notoriety. He embodied everything that is wrong with America and represented the worst of us. While I find no joy in the knowledge that cancer has taken another human life, I am consoled by the fact that his passing will help ease some of the suffering his words have caused.

Note: This piece was adapted from a Facebook post published on February 17, 2021.

Further reading:

• Trump just gave Rush Limbaugh the country’s highest civilian honor. Here are some of the racist, misogynist, and all-around awful things he’s said.
• Rush Limbaugh’s homophobic comments against Pete Buttigieg are part of a long anti-LGBTQ history
• Did Rush Limbaugh’s ‘AIDS Update’ Mock the Deaths of Gay People?
• Rush Limbaugh’s bigotry set the stage for Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party
• Rush Limbaugh created the politics that Trump used to win the White House
• Trump dittoes Limbaugh’s bigotry with a Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Rush Limbaugh died from lung cancer after denying smoking’s risk.

Feature image credit: 2011 George Gojkovich | Getty Images

 
 
Settled in before the Superbowl with some fantastic reporting from Molly Ball on the secret bipartisan campaign that saved the 2020 election. Her story for TIME describes the tremendous effort, much of it behind closed doors, by a broad coalition of people and organizations to shore up the election process and save the republic. To Ball’s great credit, she managed to capture a sweeping story of loosely coordinated, pro-democratic forces that united in the interest of election integrity. It’s a story about the recent past that carries deep implications for the future. In considering all that had to come together to keep us from spinning out, we’re reminded that the democracy in which we cache our hopes and dreams and ambitions cannot be taken for granted.

Getting groups that normally work at cross-purposes to see the bigger picture and speak with one voice is a hurdle as ancient as time. But it seems that’s just what a handful of determined individuals managed to pull off in the lead-up to the most contested election in twenty years. While much of the narrative centers around unionizer Mike Podhorzer, who spearheaded a lot of the discussions that took place, the aims of he and his allies ultimately required buy-in from entities all across the political spectrum. The unlikely convergence of labor and capital, of the AFL-CIO and US Chamber of Commerce, it turns out, was just what the doctor ordered in terms of delivering the right messaging to the American people.

First and foremost there was getting out the vote, no easy task amid the confines of a pandemic and the haze around mail-in voting. Then came announcing the count, certifying the count, and moving forward with the transition of power, with each step along the way sure to be undermined by an incumbent prima donna. We had a decent roadmap, after all, for how this would play out courtesy of Trump himself. The simplemindedness, recklessness, and sheer pettiness with which he approaches every conflict all but telegraphed his future actions. To this trove we could also add the playbook of other would-be authoritarians and full-fat dictators throughout history. We were not dealing with someone who would seek to win the argument through discussion or indeed by democratic will, but rather with legal tantrums and easily debunked propaganda.

But the scope of this effort required more than knowledge of Trump’s past conduct and the contours of democracy across historical time. It also required intimate knowledge of America’s election systems and in particular the American people’s unique susceptibility to disinformation and longstanding distrust of civic institutions. Advance messaging would be critical, as would applying pressure in the right places and to the right people in power. In some cases this proved to be the legislators in charge of certifying the results in battleground states like Michigan. Some of it played out in PR campaigns, some of it in the streets.

The results of this concerted effort more or less speak for themselves. But this story should give us pause — what if things had broken differently? What if more of the usual suspects had thrown in with Trump & Co? What if people in key positions had succumbed to the same wave of disinfo & paranoia that animated radical elements of our electorate? What if the primed messaging had been bungled, or come too late? What if the electoral college results had been closer in margin? What if committed people hadn’t shown up in the same numbers and with the same level of boldness to counter the attempts at disruption? The democratic order prevailed this time around with its institutions intact, but is it strong enough — are we strong enough — to weather the next storm?

If anything, this story demonstrates the fragility of our democracy, that it depends as much on longstanding institutions and norms as accidents of history and grassroots organizing. We ignore the lessons from this election cycle at great peril. In the end, the democracy we save is our own.

P.S. I do feel like this is a story that ought to be memorialized in some way beyond a long form article. The sporadic, decentralized nature of the pro-democracy effort may not lend itself especially well to a feature film, but a documentary should absolutely be on the table. Bless each and every one of these people. Excerpts (emphasis mine):
 

“This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”

[…]

“The best way to ensure people’s voices were heard, they decided, was to protect their ability to vote. “We started thinking about a program that would complement the traditional election-protection area but also didn’t rely on calling the police,” says Nelini Stamp, the Working Families Party’s national organizing director. They created a force of “election defenders” who, unlike traditional poll watchers, were trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a “joy to the polls” effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities.”

[…]

“It was a perilous moment. If Chatfield and Shirkey agreed to do Trump’s bidding, Republicans in other states might be similarly bullied. “I was concerned things were going to get weird,” says Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan GOP executive director turned anti-Trump activist. Norm Eisen describes it as “the scariest moment” of the entire election.”

[…]

“Reyes’ activists scanned flight schedules and flocked to the airports on both ends of Shirkey’s journey to D.C., to underscore that the lawmakers were being scrutinized. After the meeting, the pair announced they’d pressed the President to deliver COVID relief for their constituents and informed him they saw no role in the election process. Then they went for a drink at the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A street artist projected their images onto the outside of the building along with the words THE WORLD IS WATCHING.”

[…]

“Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence could reject states’ electoral votes. He told them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Then he returned to the White House as they sacked the building. As lawmakers fled for their lives and his own supporters were shot and trampled, Trump praised the rioters as “very special.”

It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples. “There’s an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable democracy is.”

[…]

“As I was reporting this article in November and December, I heard different claims about who should get the credit for thwarting Trump’s plot. Liberals argued the role of bottom-up people power shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly the contributions of people of color and local grassroots activists. Others stressed the heroism of GOP officials like Van Langevelde and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Trump at considerable cost. The truth is that neither likely could have succeeded without the other. “It’s astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is,” says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director. “It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff–if you don’t look down, you don’t fall. Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down.”

Democracy won in the end. The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.“

Further reading:

• The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election
• A Stress Test for Our Democracy
• What Russia’s Meddling Can Tell Us About Their Motives and Our Indifference

Feature image credit: Michelle Gustafson for TIME

 
 
As we allow ourselves to take a breath, let’s remember that the mere reporting of election results is only the first step in this process. We’re now in the “interregnum” between election day and the point at which both candidates respect the outcome. We’re already seeing the contours of a clash election analysts, academics, political strategists, and lawyers have warned us about for months: a struggle between the structural integrity of our political system and the integrity of the sitting president and his enablers. Whether our system is resilient enough to withstand the coming turbulence — and the degree to which we will see an orderly transition of power — hinges not so much on a clear and unambiguous election result but on the norms that sustain our democracy.

The concession speech, like the one Al Gore gave in 2000 thirty-six days after election night, is one such norm. I imagine I’m not alone in thinking we’re more likely to see the release of The Winds of Winter this holiday season than a genuine concession speech from someone who’s laid the groundwork for the very postelection contest we’re seeing unfold. Any such remarks on the matter will undoubtedly be diluted with more baseless allegations of fraud that will seep ever deeper into the psyche of his base. It would, in effect, be the concession speech equivalent of a non-apology. Whatever scenario we can come up with for how this plays out, from the plausible to the harebrained, the reality is that each is eminently more likely than one in which Trump humbly concedes the election to one Joseph Biden.

Symbolic though they may be, norms matter a great deal for the preservation of liberal democracy. The peaceful transition of power is itself a democratic institution, and a sign of a properly functioning civil society. We take it for granted in the Western world today, but peaceful transfer represents a key milestone on a nation’s path to democracy, as exampled in Armenia following the Velvet Revolution in 2018. Countries without it — and countries who lose it — have proven vulnerable to fascist regime change and slid headlong into increasingly undemocratic outcomes.

That 2020 would be a stress test for American democracy was always a given. How we will fare in the face of it remains an open question, and will depend on the integrity of our political leadership and, very possibly, our instincts as a people for direct action defenses of our institutions and norms.

As Barton Gellman in The Atlantic impressed upon us last month: “Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede.”

Further reading:

• What If Trump Refuses to Concede?
• Here’s what happens if a U.S. president refuses to leave office
• What happens if a president refuses to concede?
• The Deadline That Could Hand Trump the Election
• The dishonest heart of the challenge to the 2020 election results
• Irreducibly Multiple: Notes on the US Election, by Amanda Armstrong-Price

Feature image credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto